The Original Sources Of Romeo And Juliet

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The Original Sources of Romeo and Juliet

    There were many other written stories of Romeo and Juliet before William Shakespeare first wrote his version of Romeo and Juliet (Watts 13). The earliest rendition of the play Romeo and Juliet dates back to the third century AD. Then the story reappears in the fifteenth century in a more detailed form. Luigi da Porto publishes a version of this story in 1530. De Porto's play version is where Shakespeare gets the plot of his version of Romeo and Juliet (Bentley138). Then in 1544, Matteo Bandello publishes his version of the story of Romeo and Juliet based on De Porto's play. Boiastuau then translated Bandello's play into French in 1559. Then in 1562 Arthur Brooke translates the French version of Romeo and Juliet into English with a few additions. From these stories William Shakespeare based his famous play Romeo and Juliet.
    The earliest rendition of Romeo and Juliet was a story called Ephesiaca of Xenophon of Ephesus that was written in the third century AD (Gibbons 33). The wife Anthia is separated from her husband and rescued from robbers by Perilaus; to avoid marrying him she obtains a drug from a doctor that she believes will kill her but it is only a sleeping potion. She awakens in tomb and is carried off by tomb robbers.
    In the fifteenth century the story is written by Masuccio Salernitano titled Cinquante Novelle (Campbell and Quinn 710). The story takes place in Siena; Mariotto secretly marries Giannozza with the help of a ...

Submitted by: digitalessays
Date Submitted: 09-27-07 5:55am
Category: English
Words: 1149
Pages: 4.6